⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👁️The Enchantments of Pure Consciousness: The popular science of wonder is getting things backwards. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 The Two Kinds of Desire: And one of the most important things I know. Read it here.

⚡️ Protocol Cards: Explore evidence-backed practices for instant nervous system regulation. Try it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“Raise your arms if you see an aurora. With those instructions, two nights went by with, well, clouds -- mostly. On the third night of returning to same peaks, though, the sky not only cleared up but lit up with a spectacular auroral display. Arms went high in the air, patience and experience paid off, and the creative featured image was captured as a composite from three separate exposures. The setting is a summit of the Austnesfjorden (a fjord) close to the town of Svolvear on the Lofoten islands in northern Norway. The year was 2014. This year, our Sun is just passing solar maximum, the peak in its 11-year surface activity cycle. As expected, some spectacular auroras have recently resulted.”

💥 Something Rather Than Nothing

The quote above rhymes with the passage I’ll share below from the late John O’Donohue. This passage mirrored my own recurring but vague notions about the enormity of detail in this world, here expressed with such precision and lucidity, it was as if those thoughts had found their voice:

“One of my favorite sentences in the Western philosophical tradition is from Leibniz; it was subsequently used by Schelling and Heidegger: "The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing." I think this is a great sentence, because it alerts one immediately to the mystery of the presence of things, which we so often tend to forget. In post-modern culture, we live increasingly in a virtual world and seem to have lost visceral and vital contact with the actual world.

Another way of looking at this statement is: the real mystery is that there is so much. Everywhere the human eye looks, everywhere the human mind turns, there is a huge panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two fields, no two faces or no two biographies are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering. This is not an abstract thing. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field. Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the "undying difference in the corner of a field."

Part of the way we can rediscover magic in the “mundane” is by leaning past our conditioned ways of viewing everyday objects and widen the aperture of our attention such that the details that are always there but unseen finally get noticed.

Around you right now are hundreds, thousands of tiny details slipping past your awareness. This is useful and functional. We need to be able to attend to what matters. But sometimes what matters is what we haven’t been attending to. It’s a worthwhile skill to explore the novel territory living beneath the conceptual map of our everyday life.

🌼 Consider the Daisies

Ponder this passage from G.K. Chesterton:

🤓 Learn This Word

Kenopsia: The eerie atmosphere of an abandoned but familiar place.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Spirituality can’t be reduced to what’s happening in the brain

“I find myself in the heart of a vast sea of mourners. Everyone is dressed in black, yet this is no funeral of despair – it is a procession of devotion. Under the scorching sun of Iraq, we walk together, step by step, toward the shrine of a leader who was martyred more than 1,300 years ago. Around me, grief takes many forms. In one corner, someone whispers prayers; in another, people rhythmically beat their chests. Nearby, a few people break down in tears as they hear the story of Imam Hussain’s martyrdom. Along the way, strangers offer free food and drinks, not as charity, but as gifts they plead with you to accept. To serve a pilgrim is, for them, a divine honour.

This is Arbaeen: the world’s largest walking pilgrimage. Each year, more than 20 million people walk the 80-kilometre route – with some travelling much longer distances, and some completing the journey barefoot. All are drawn by love, sorrow and unwavering faith.

As a researcher of religion and spirituality, I’ve always been fascinated by questions like: how can I truly understand these people? How can I study such experiences? What happens in the mind of someone who cries as if they’ve just lost a loved one – over a person who died more than 1,000 years ago?”

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